Full movie description "The Beast Must Die":

Tom Newcliffe, a rich businessman and expert hunter summons six guests to his huge country estate which he has rigged up with video cameras and a high-tech security system. He tells them and his surprised wife that they are all to stay over a weekend and that all of them will be kept on the estate during that weekend. For each guest, dead bodies have followed in their wake and the way that the dead have been murdered means that one of the guest is a werewolf and Tom has summoned his guests here to discover who it is and to hunt it down... The film has a clip at the beginning asking people in the audience to try to identify the werewolf and near the end there is a 30-second "Werewolf Break" for the audience to think over the evidence...

Reviews of the The Beast Must Die

"This is a murder mystery in which you are the detective ... but instead of 'who is the murderer?', the question is 'who is the werewolf?' ..." And so we have an eccentric millionaire who gathers together a group of six people, including his wife, in his mansion and states that one of them is a werewolf. How does he know this? Well, we don't question such things. There is a newly-reunited couple, an ex-United Nations delegate, an eccentric biologist, and an expert on werewolf folklore. Over a period of three terrifying nights, he narrows down the list of suspects to discover who the beast is ...

The movie opens with Calvin Lockhart running through his estate, being pursued by commandos and monitored by the new high-tech security system which he is testing. That opening sequence goes on and on, and there are many such tedious 'chase' scenes in the movie which make it something of a chore to watch. Ultimately it took me three attempts to finally get through this whole movie, and that's never a good sign. It's a shame, because there are some really great scenes as well ... the climax inparticular is suitably thrilling. We have pretty much an all-star cast in this movie, so if you're a fan of Peter Cushing, Sir Michael Gambon (currently playing Dumbledore), Charles Gray or 'blaxploitation' actors Calvin Lockhart and Marlene Clark, then you'll probably want to see this. Thanks to this casting, the acting is slightly above average for a B-movie, but nothing spectacular. It almost fits into the blaxploitation category itself, thanks to the jazzy, funky soundtrack and the alternative marketing title "Black Werewolf".

As for the 'guess the werewolf' element, as far as I can tell you can only narrow it down to three characters before the 'werewolf break' comes along, and then it's just a case of guessing between them. I guessed wrongly (although the character I chose would have made for a better ending), but as I suspected, the werewolf break was something that was added later by the producers and it wasn't the director's idea. The film wasn't made with this in mind, so it's actually impossible to guess for sure who the werewolf is. In fact, Paul Annett hated the idea of the 'werewolf break'.

Overall this is a fairly entertaining werewolf B-movie, and werewolf enthusiasts will probably enjoy it, but it could have been better.